Recovery
by millenniumrobin
Summary: In the six weeks since the conclusion of "Metus", bodies have healed, but relationships have fractured even more. While the discovery of Wally West's existence in the land of the living has brought the original Team back together, bonds forged in the fires of Santa Prisca are threatening to break apart. Can the Team hold it together long enough to save one of their own?


"Just tell her, okay?" The words, said before they'd even really entered the conscious part of his brain, both depressed and infuriated Wally West. Depressed because he wasn't going to be able to tell Artemis himself. Infuriated because at the moment of his death, he'd spit out a one-liner. And not a cool one-liner, like the drunk pilot in Independence Day. But a lame, cheesy, sentimental one-liner that would leave anyone listening wondering what exactly he'd meant. Tell Artemis he loved her? That he had eaten the leftover pizza in the fridge? Vague commands were the worst.

Ranking up there in things that were "the worst" would be the current situation, the aforementioned "moment of his death". Wally had never time travelled, although he had posited with the speed both he and his uncle possessed that it was theoretically possible, so he didn't know for _sure_ that he was about to die. But he knew. The lightning put off by the energy storm created by the Magnetic Field Disrupter had hurt at first. A lot. Like that time Black Adam broke his arm, only worse. But then it hadn't hurt anymore. Wally still knew that he was being hit, but only because the fuzziness increased every time it happened.

 _Great use of your scientific vocabulary, Wally_ , he thought. Okay, so "fuzziness" wasn't the best term, but Wally couldn't think of another at the moment. Dying is a lot more stressful than people generally let on, you know? It was basically like an old television set with rabbit ears, when you're turning them to try and get a better picture. Except every time the lightning hit, it was like making the static on the screen worse instead of better. The younger members of the team would have just looked at him with a puzzled expression at that analogy before he told them to simply go ask their parents.

In his heart of hearts, Wally was a scientist. It was why he had recreated the chemical composition that had given his uncle his speed. And he had blown up the garage doing it. Hey, he never said he was going to win a Nobel or anything. But Wally did know was that his molecular structure was breaking down. It didn't take a genius to know that when hands pass straight through your body, something was seriously wrong. Wally didn't have WebMD handy, but it seemed logical to him that becoming semi-transparent was indicative of serious medical condition.

His awareness of the world around him hadn't diminished at all. In fact, as his other senses failed him, it only seemed to heighten his sight and hearing even more. He could begin to see the individual pattern of each snowflake, the way they danced around their bodies, buffeted by miniature air currents created by the three speedsters running. Wally's eyes focused on the swirling vortex of colors around him, shapes that almost seemed to pass for people forming in the wind. Those minor details threatened to overwhelm his brain, leaving physical tasks, like putting one foot in front of the other on the icy snowpack and breathing, to instinct.

Actually, Wally wasn't sure he was breathing right now. Not because he could feel the biting arctic air in his lungs, but because he _couldn't_. Feeling was one of those things that had abandoned him in the last few minutes, though that also meant that pain had left him as well, so it wasn't all bad. Still, Wally had to admit that he missed the familiar feeling of running; the air crackling around him, buzzing like it was alive, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. But if his choices were pain mixed with the feeling that made him feel so alive for the better part of a decade or the strange emptiness that he felt now, Wally decided that for the moment, he could live with a sweet relief from pain.

Out of the corner of his eye, Wally caught another fleeting glimpse of the device that had caused all this trouble: a Reach Magnetic Field Disruptor. Or MFD, which in his mind stood for something his mother would still try to wash his mouth out with soap if he ever uttered. Lex Luthor had said the only way to stop the energy field it created was to run in the opposite direction of the field's rotation. As soon as Uncle Barry and Bart had made a beeline for the alien tech, he'd run through the calculations in his head. There was no way the two of them were going to be able to generate enough energy to stop the chrysalis, even if the energy output of that thing was at the low end of his estimates.

So Wally had done something stupid. He'd raced out to help them, thinking his energy combined with theirs might make the difference. And it seemed to be working. But his coming out here wasn't the stupid thing. No, that had been leaving without saying goodbye to Artemis. Now he had to hope that she'd go easy on him when he made it back.

 _If_ he made it back.

Round and round the device the three speedsters continued running. Going this fast for this long, Wally would have expected his legs to screaming from pain. Instead they just felt numb. No, numb had a feeling, this wasn't numb. This was just nothingness, like he was speeding around in circles on a cushion of air, being powered by some cosmic force.

"Kid!" Barry's shout reached his ears. But when Wally went to respond, words did not come out. No breath in his lungs, no wind on his face, no feeling anywhere along his entire body.

Time seemed to slow even further now. He'd experienced it before, moving at his top speed, but this was slower than he'd ever seen. _This must be what it's like for Barry when he starts moving near the speed of light_ , Wally thought. It was almost as if he could see individual molecules moving in front of his eyes, each engaged in a chaotic dance that taunted him to go even faster.

The next sound that filled his ears weren't words or anything human, but an incomprehensible roar. Barry and Bart faded away before his eyes. Squinting through the swirling wall of energy that surrounded the vortex, Wally could have sworn that he saw the briefest but brightest flash of green among the frosty grey landscape.

Then the noise flooded his senses, blanketing him in a haze of interference and white noise. It was disorientating, discombobulating, but just as suddenly there was silence. Everything around Wally was a blank whiteness even more stark and unforgiving than the Arctic wasteland where he had just been.

There was no frame for reference. Nothing he could see that would indicate up or down, left or right, forward or backward. His feet, that's right, he could suddenly feel them again too, felt like he was running in a vacuum, unencumbered by gravity or friction. No signs around him pointed toward a direction where he should go or gave him a hint at what he should do.

But still, Wally kept running.

The reason why escaped him. Maybe it was that since he had been 13, running is what made him feel powerful, accepted, even liked. Maybe it was because running had been his escape for his entire life. Or maybe it was a voice inside him shouting that if he stopped running now he would never be able to start again.

So Wally ran. He had no idea where he was running or if he was actually even heading towards something, but then again, standing around wasn't going to get him anywhere either.

Time was a funny thing to speedsters. Supposedly, with super speed, you can never be late, even though Wally was late all the time. That had always frustrated Artemis. He just saw it as flipping people's expectations. What this all means to say is that Wally had no idea how long he'd been running when things started to change around him. It could have been just minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been days, but when your frame of reference is one white blankness to infinity or another, it really doesn't matter.

That blank white wall that simultaneously seemed to be directly in front of his face and also stretch infinitely far into the distance began getting more color. Small changes, like greys and whatnot, but when all you've seen is white forever, even the smallest patch of grey can look like a Van Gogh painting.

Those patches started to organize themselves into a swirling vortex. Wally tried to turn away from it. He'd just come from this movie and didn't like the ending. But no matter which way he turned, the vortex rotated with him. An azure and grey circle appeared at the center, a pinprick at first, but growing larger with every passing second. It seemed like no matter what he wanted to do, Wally was heading for that opening. But as it grew larger, he recognized what was on the other side.

A frozen wasteland awaited him. Whether it was the same place he had just been or some planet halfway across the galaxy, he didn't know. But Wally knew that if he stayed here, wherever here was, he'd never get out. This was his one chance. With a yell, he threw himself through the opening.

A blast of cold air smacked Wally in the face as his red boots struggled to gain purchase on the icy surface. His legs suddenly felt as if he'd been running for days straight. Unable to stop himself, Wally awkwardly stumbled and hit the ground, rolling through the snow before coming to a stop.

Freezing air bit his lungs and nostrils and his body felt like he wanted to sleep for a week, but he was alive. Nothing could make him regret that right now.

It wasn't until the snow began to accumulate on his goggles that Wally realized he should probably get up and try to figure out where he was, lest he wanted to become the world's first speedster icicle. A speedsicle, if you will.

Pushing his goggles up and squinting his green eyes in the harsh environment, he felt a sense of haunting familiarity wash over him. He recognized this place. This was where he had been just before he disappeared, running to stop the MFD.

But there was no sight of it. Not the MFD, not the team, not his uncle or his first cousin once removed.

And no sign of his girlfriend either. "Artemis?" The howling wind whipping across the snow swallowed his shout.

He took a step forward but his body felt almost completely drained of energy. Wally had no idea how long he'd been gone or how much energy he'd expended. Or the last time he ate, for that matter. All he wanted to do was lay down in the snow and nap, but he couldn't. He had to find out what was going on.

Forcing himself to take another step forward, then another, Wally felt his foot connect with something hard and metal just underneath the snow. Wind was blowing flakes across a bronze plaque of some kind. Kneeling onto the ice pack, Wally stretched his gloved hand outward. Wiping the accumulated snow off the plaque, he recoiled as he saw his own face staring back at him, a cocky grin frozen forever in the cold metal. Below were stamped the following words:

KID FLASH  
JULY 4TH, 2016  
NO GREATER FRIEND  
NO GREATER HERO

"ARETMIS!" The wind seemed to increase to swallow the shout that left his throat raw, taunting his power with its own. His green eyes remained locked on the words, his face. Wally pressed a hand to his chest. He wasn't semi-transparent anymore, hands weren't passing right through him. There was no way he was dead, was he?

"She isn't here, Kid Flash." Wally spun on one knee, trying to push himself to his feet. He couldn't stand. Emotionally and physically, he was drained. "Artemis Crock has not been to this place in a long, long time."

That voice, even distorted by the howling Arctic winds, there was no mistaking it. Wally had taunted its owner just weeks before. At least it seemed to be just weeks before to him. He still had no idea _when_ he was.

"Savage!" Wally's eyes traced over the man's black hair, blue tunic, and scarred face. At least those things hadn't changed. "What did you do to her?" Again he tried to get to his feet, only to stumble back to the snowy surface.

A deep, booming sound began carrying through the Arctic wind, much more than his shouts had. His emerald eyes narrowing, Wally attempted to contort his face into a scowl, but even that was taking more effort than he had to give at the moment. "Do to her? I haven't done a thing to her." Vandal Savage covered the distance between them in a few long, surprisingly fast, strides. He knelt in front of the redhead, grabbing him by his hair to force the young superhero to look at him.

"Then where…"

"She hasn't been here in years, boy. She moved on."

 **XXXXX**

The door in front of Jason Todd was familiar, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach sure wasn't. It was something adjacent to nervousness, but was mixed with a heavy dose of sorrow, maybe even a little anger tossed in for good measure. Granted, the first time he'd come calling to this door he had felt nervous, but for an entirely different reason. That had been a beginning. This was the end.

The relationship between him and Artemis Crock had always been somewhat complicated. From that first night in a dark and dirty alleyway in some Eastern European hellhole to this modest apartment in North Gotham, the two misfits had used each other to fulfill their physical needs. She used him to fill a hole left when Wally West died. He used her to fill a hole left by a childhood of absent parents and living on the street.

Jason wasn't sure when it happened, but suddenly they weren't just using each other for their bodies. Nights began getting longer, even before Damian went and got himself dragged off to Santa Prisca. After he came back, nights started turning into mornings, mornings into weekends. Toothbrushes were purchased for each other's places, and things started to be left behind with a knowledge that their owner would be back soon to retrieve them if needed.

For the first time in a long time, Jason Todd had been truly happy. For the first time ever, he had admitted to himself that he was in love. He had wanted to tell her, so many times in those months following Santa Prisca, but the time never seemed right. Well, the time never seemed right and his mind constantly would play through the worst possible outcomes of saying those words. The tamest was Artemis bursting out laughing and punching his arm, telling him not to joke like that. The harshest featured her eyes welling with tears, telling him to get out and never come back. It had only been on the rarest of occasions that he allowed himself to dream that his exclamation of love would be returned in kind.

But now that moment would never come. Those words that he longed to say would be left forever unsaid. Wally West was still alive, and there was no way he could hold her heart while he lived. Second place, second Robin, always second best.

If Jason was truly honest with himself, Artemis' heart had never been there for him to hold in the first place. It had always been with Wally, alive or not. He wasn't sure why he'd deluded himself into thinking otherwise.

Balancing the cardboard box in his arms, Jason extended a hand to knock on that familiar door. The box wasn't heavy by any means, mostly filled with tchotchkes and tokens of affection they'd exchanged over the past few months. There was a lacy bra that he'd found behind a dresser. He was still trying to figure out how it had gotten back there.

Some of the trinkets that she had given him still lived in his apartment, but any that he'd given her had gone into the box. Those were painful to look at. It didn't matter to him what she did with them, so he hoped against hope that she would at least keep some of them. But he needed them out his apartment.

A quick _one-two_ rap of his knuckles was greeted with the door opening a couple seconds later. Jason tried to plaster a smile to his face, but it immediately faltered when he saw her.

Artemis had been crying again. Not as bad as before, but the telltale streaks were there along with the redness around her eyes. In the six weeks since Dick and Barbara revealed that Wally was alive and in the hands of the Light, Jason had seen this look a lot. Well, not a lot. Considering how much time they had been spending together, it almost felt like Artemis was avoiding him. He wouldn't have blamed her if she had, but it was good to see her all the same.

"Hey." That was all the greeting she could muster. Maybe it was all the greeting he deserved.

"Hi." Okay, his response wasn't much better, but what did she want him to say? Sorry that your boyfriend is alive and being tortured, but we had a good thing going so you should just stay with me? "I brought you some final things." Coward.

Artemis simply opened the door wider to let him in. Jason had crossed that threshold more times than he could count, but it was only in the past few weeks that it had begun to feel like a stranger's place again. He felt like an unwanted guest, as if his presence here was an intrusion or insult. He hated that feeling.

Artemis gently took the box from his hands, walking it over to set it on a small coffee table in the center of the living room. A black duffel bag, zipped and loaded, was sitting on the floor near the couch. Her blonde hair, which she had been letting grow out again recently, was pulled back into a severe bun. Black utility pants covered her legs and a tight black jacket was zipped to her throat. But what caught Jason's attention the most were her black combat boots. Different from her footwear that she normally donned as Tigress, they jogged a memory from his youth. He'd seen them before.

"You're going as Artemis?" Her back stiffened, and as she turned to him, Jason caught the briefest glimpse of emerald peeking out from under the combat pants.

"Don't do this Jay. Not now." Artemis brushed past him heading for the apartment's small kitchen, hands shaking as she grabbed a glass and started running the tap.

"Don't do what, Artemis?" Jason followed, leaning against a wall at the far side of the kitchen so it didn't seem like he was cornering her. "Don't show concern for how you're doing? Don't drop your stuff off? Don't come on this mission?" As much as he tried to stop it, Jason couldn't keep his voice from rising or the tiniest hint of venom from creeping into it.

Artemis took a slow drink of the water before setting the glass down, probably harder than she had meant to. "You know exactly what I mean, Todd." When she turned to look at him, her grey eyes were cold and hard. The use of his last name made Jason take a step back into the wall involuntarily.

"No, Crock," he said, responding with her last name in kind. "I don't think I do."

"You are so full of shit." She stalked past him, shoulder connecting with his. It was the first physical contact they'd had in weeks, and part of Jason knew that he'd gladly accept more, even in the form of her knocking him around. So he kept pushing.

"I'm not going to apologize for what we did, Artemis. I'm not going to apologize for how I feel."

"I swear, sometimes that helmet of yours has made you denser than usual."

"Then spell it out for me, Artemis."

" _You_ aren't the one who has to apologize!" There was a fire in her eyes now, steely grey turning stormy in an instant. " _I_ am. _I'm_ the one who's going to have to explain why I stopped looking." She looked like she was about to hit him, advancing with every word. " _I'm_ the one who's going to have to explain why I started sleeping with someone else. _I'm_ going to have to be the one to explain why _I_ gave up." Artemis paused, her shoulders slumped in defeat.

"You get to go back to your liquor and your cigarettes and your woman of the week. I get to live with the guilt that I've betrayed Wally and what we had."

"You didn't betray him, he was dead!" Jason could only wonder what that shouted sentence with no context sounded like to Artemis' neighbors. It wouldn't have been the strangest thing they'd ever heard from her apartment involving the two of them though.

 _Crack_. There it was. Jason reached a hand up to rub his stinging cheek, but thought better of it. Artemis stepped away from him, turning her back. Her shoulders shook underneath her jacket. A whine from the bedroom let them both know Brucely was becoming concerned over the encounter.

"Fine, I'll leave." Jason made sure to take a wide berth around Artemis as he made for the door. "I was going to offer you a ride to the Cave, but I'm sure you'd rather take a zeta anyway." Jason's hand wrapped around the door handle as he yanked it open.

"Take your gun." The words stopped him, and for the first time, Jason noticed the small gun laying on the table beside the door. The matte black metal was scuffed and scratched from when she'd given it to him almost a year ago as a "Welcome Back From the Dead" gift. Yet it still bore the distinctive orange and black stripe along the grip. Something told Jason she wouldn't be getting something similar for Wally when he came back.

"Keep it," Jason growled, stepping back out through the threshold. "Suits you better anyway." He quickly pulled the door shut behind him, cutting off any response. Jason took the stairs back down to the street, where a downpour had started. The former Robin scowled as he zipped up his leather jacket and yanked on his motorcycle helmet. His ebony locks with white streak in the front were already drenched and sat uncomfortably against his forehead. He didn't care.

Kicking his motorcycle into gear, Jason took off from Artemis' apartment building, tires blasting through the rain that had accumulated on the roads. The last place he wanted to go was the Batcave. Any number of hellholes he'd stopped at during his Resurrection Tour sounded like better options at the moment.

No. Jason didn't run from fights. He dove into them headlong, kicking, punching, clawing his way through. It didn't mean he always won, or even won most of the time, but he fought. So no matter how much he hated this mission, it came first. And if that meant saving the long-lost love of the woman he loved, then that is what he would do.

Jason Todd had lost a lot of things that mattered to him before. As he drove through the storm, he only wished it would get easier.

 **XXXXX**

A comforting tightening around his right knee followed the now-familiar mechanical whine that Dick Grayson was used to. In the few months since his injuries at the hands of the Joker, he'd been working tirelessly at rehabilitating his badly damaged right leg. Apparently, his knee had a crowbar allergy. Who knew?

As he watched the mechanical brace close around his leg, a faint blue glow indicating its miniaturized power source was fully functional, Dick marveled at the wonder of engineering Bruce and Tim had created for him. Any moment he was standing he'd been working with different prototypes they had been creating, until they had settled on this design.

Fully encapsulating his lower right leg and knee, the brace provided a full range of motion, stability for his still-healing joint, could be concealed under his suit save for some bulkiness, and also added an extra boost of strength if necessary. Dick fervently hoped that it wouldn't be.

A twinge of sadness crept into his chest as he began pulling his improved Nightwing armor on. While being mostly confined to a wheelchair had been a frustrating experience for the man who had spent his childhood flying through the air on a trapeze and his teenager years jumping from rooftops, there were definitely things he was going to miss about it. Like the redhead in the wheelchair by the door wearing a concerned expression.

"If you wanted to see my butt, Babs, all you had to do was ask," Dick quipped as he began pulling the bodysuit up his back. The love of his life rolled her way deeper into his room, the glasses pushed up to the bridge of her nose doing nothing to hide the worry in her eyes.

"You shouldn't be going out there." Her azure gaze drifted down to his right knee pointedly. "You're not ready. This team can function without you in the field." Dick sighed audibly as he began zipping up his armor.

"Wally is my best friend, Barbara. Who knows how long the Light have had him? It took us two months after Santa Prisca to discover he was alive. Another six weeks to find out where the Light are keeping him." He wrapped his utility belt around his waist, clipping it firmly as he spoke. "That's almost four months they've had him and we've done nothing. Not to mention how long they had him before we even knew. I'm not going to leave him in their hands a second longer than I have to."

Dick grabbed his escrima sticks as he turned to walk out of his room, but Barbara swung her chair in front of him, blocking the way. He could feel the sudden stop pulling at his still-healing knee, and he worked to keep a grimace from his face. But she knew. She always knew.

"You're going to slow them down more than anything, Grayson. You're not ready."

"Bruce cleared me for this mission."

"Bruce was always going to do whatever you told him you wanted to do!" Her voice was rising now. "You're too close to this, Dick. You're not thinking…"

"I've thought about it long enough. It's time to act. Wally was my soldier. If he's alive, I'm going to get him back." He moved to step around her wheelchair toward the door.

"And what if _you_ don't come back?" Barbara's voice was lower now, but the hurt was still there. Words and phrases flashed through his mind, but none of them seemed to fit. Nothing that he could say would convince her that he was going to be fine, that he'd make it back alive and, more or less, in one piece. So Dick took a deep breath, refocused his mind, and set himself to the mission ahead.

"I have to go find Kaldur." He could have sworn that tears jumped to her blue eyes, threatening to fall in a cascade. But just as quickly as they appeared they vanished, replaced with an icy cold stare. Without a word, Barbara turned her chair sharply and began rolling her way back down the hall.

The mission was sure off to a fantastic start.


End file.
